The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Over the years, Matt Taibbi has written numerous insightful articles on topics like Wall Street, health care, the housing crisis and so on. But when it comes to 9/11, Taibbi has a big blind spot coupled with a mean streak. After his latest in a long string of hit pieces on 9/11 truth, Jon Gold challenged Taibbi to a debate. Here’s what happened.

Obama's Big Sellout
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

MATT TAIBBI
Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

“Why Propaganda Trumps Truth” by Paul Craig Roberts is one of the more fascinating things I have read lately.

The Rovian Republicans are always quick to smear anything that questions or opposes them in any way, but Roberts is not so easy to tar. He was assistant secretary of the treasury under Reagan. And those who write off conservatives as loony might consider his academic record. His alma maters include the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University. He was a senior research fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. He served on the congressional staff in the House and Senate before he was appointed by Reagan.

In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it." Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues [please note the videos are available at the source].

Immigration, gender, LGBT rights, race in America, equality, fair drug laws, the dangers of corporate power in America ... these are just a few of the subjects we feature every day here at AlterNet.

Below, we've assembled the 10 stories that most enraged commenters this year -- the articles that were linked to by conservative sites, ranted about on conspiracy blogs, and inspired people to send some downright nasty notes to AlterNet. They cover topics ranging from the facts about Sarah Palin, to the truth behind America's Marijuana laws, to the backwards thinking behind various conspiracy theories.

Here are the top ten AlterNet stories that outraged readers this year:

A poll of 17 countries that came out September of this year revealed that majorities in only nine of them "believe that al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States." A Zogby poll from 2006 found that in America, 42% of respondents believed the US government and 9/11 Commission "covered up" the events of 9/11. It's safe to say that at least tens of millions of Americans don't believe anything close to the official account offered by the 9/11 Commission, and that much of the outside world remains skeptical.

Over the years, AlterNet has run dozens of stories, mostly critical, of the 9/11 Movement. Matt Taibbi has taken on the 9/11 Truth Movement head on in a series of articles, and most recently in his new book, The Great Derangement.

Here's an excerpt from the interview with Matt Taibbi, left gatekeeper, at the Onion AV Club:

AVC: In The Great Derangement, you document your infiltration into John Hagee's Cornerstone Church and your incognito participation in 9/11 Truth Movement meetings. Have you gotten a reaction from either camp since the book's publication?

If Matt Taibbi had even one percent of Gore Vidal's intellectual grasp of American history, perhaps then it would make reading his presumed 'leftist' opinion about 9/11 a little easier to stomach. (I presume that Taibbi pitches from the left, because his screed is published at Alternet.org and AfterDowningStreet.org.) Fortunately, we don't need him. Gore Vidal is still among us, and it is his image and voice in the new Italian documentary 'Zero: an investigation into 9/11', that expresses a critical perspective of 9/11 that will ring true to the ears of those who will hear, and will help to free the prisoners currently living out the Allegory of the Cave, mesmerized by shadows of terror, cast upon the wall by the likes of yellow journalists like Taibbi.

Just ran into the clips of Bill Maher's 1st show back and there were some interesting moments to be had. Reflecting on last year, I still think his big interruption moment of 2007 was rejuvenative on all accounts. Yes, it could have been done with a little bit more finessing, but more important is that it was done. The perfect could have become the enemy of the good in this case. And it got people talking. We need more interruptions done strategically. What we want is people talking, debating, raising the issue. There are many fronts and faces in this challenge. The civil rights movement successfully found a place for the different strategies and styles of Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and MLK. Bill Maher and the rest of corporate media have a long election year ahead of them. It could get more interesting than anyone can imagine.

You've probably already been asked this too many times, but, are you planning to write the third installment of your 9/11 series? If not, why?

- Dallas Redig

Hi Dallas. I'll eventually publish this written debate I had with the Loose Change guys via email. It was pretty funny stuff. At one point I asked them if they'd made even a single phone call before they ran that stuff about the hijackers still being alive. Their answer was that they had made some calls, but "couldn't get through" to anyone. Then when I tried to point out that not getting through to anyone in your research is usually a good time not to publish your unverified material, they just ignored me and started babbling about how the original congressional report about 9/11 had 28 pages redacted, etc. etc. etc. It wasn't really a debate, it was like one angry non sequitur after another. Eventually they dropped the debate in the middle -- I haven't heard from them in a while.

Matt Taibbi is at it again, and although he has apparently had his mouth washed out with soap, he's still madly trying to reconcile poll after poll after poll reflecting widespread distrust in the official story of 9/11 with his blind faith in the "Zelikow-Approved" 9/11 Commission Report.

Like Taibbi's earlier egregious, indefensible hit piece, he struggles with concepts that he cannot understand, and winds up with an amorphous stroll through a bunch of lazily stitched together anecdotes which suggest that he doesn't even really care about the issue, not even enough to make a half-hearted attempt at researching OKC.

Like a little kid who can't stop wiggling a loose tooth or stop picking at a scab, Taibbi is back, taking pot shots at Nico Haupt, and bravely setting up a handful of strawmen to decisively tackle. The ones he can't tackle, like the collapse of WTC7, he mocks.

The best part of the Alternet post is actually the comments area below his article (which was originally written for Rolling Stone). Try reading them sometime, Taibbi, you might actually learn something.

A hardcore Sixteen Percenter to the bitter end, Taibbi offers the official story a blank check for benefit-of-doubt while at the same time offering no quarter to the majority who just don't buy the official line anymore.

Hope that formula continues to work out for ya when you're an Eight Percenter, Taibbi. Looks like it's all ya got.